Hello listeners... its time to embark upon Season 5 of the Code Story podcast. As we step into this journey together, you an expect to hear amazing stories about MVP's, trade offs, determining feature importance, building teams - and scaling, or fighting scale, as you grow. Our guest list continues to impress, with appearances from Abhinav Asthana of Postman, Derrick Reimer of SavvyCal, Hazel Savage of Musiio... and so many more.
Season 5 starts on June 15th, so subscribe today to ensure you don't miss an episode.
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Sophy Lee was born in China, but grew up in a lot of countries and places. She grew up in Australia, lived all over Texas, and went to Harvard for undergrad, studying economics. She is an avid bike racer, mainly on the road, and a triathlete. The combination of living in difference places, school, and racing lead her into the tech world. In fact, she moved to San Francisco to race - though he had taught herself to program post college and had an idea brewing in her head on how to become a better engineer in San Fran.
Sophy has been working on her current product for 6.5 years, starting at a different company formerly known as Shuttle. The product was built originally to map out a trip from point a to b, and have a driver give a protected ride to a child. Four years ago, her current company acquired the product, at which point she joined as CTO to lead the Technology & Information Security team.
Mitchell Hashimoto started programming in middle school, teaching himself how to code through open source libraries and zip files he could download on the internet. He is a pilot, and owns his own plane, which happens to be a Cirrus. He spends an hour a day studying or practicing flying, and even takes his wife and dog up every now and again, when there is something worth flying to and they can make the oxygen work for then dog.
He attended college at the University of Washington in Seattle, which was located equidistance from Amazon, Google and other cloud focused infrastructure companies. As you could guess, there was a huge focus on this topic while he was at school, and he was able to gain access to vast resources through his computer lab and research projects. It was these projects put the ideas in his head, on what he could make in order for infrastructure to work better.
RECAST: Try to surround yourself with people who believe in you. So in that same example that I mentioned, that was my biggest mistake and biggest learning. My wife was absolutely amazing. She was a rock and, she was picking me up off the ground when I was in the corner crying and rocking back and forth when the project was going south. She was like, no, you've got to keep going this is just a part of the journey. We are going to get through it, and it will be fine. So she really picked me up. You have to surround yourself with people that are going to tell you that because there are going to be days where it just sucks, and it's not a good day. There are going to be days where this is the greatest job in the world, and you love it. Some days it's just nothing is going my way. You've got to be able to get through those. I think a huge reason why I was able to get through those days was my wife and the encouragement people were surrounding me with.
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Ofer Shaked started in on computers early. He was passionate about tech from a very early age, and started programming when he was 10 years old. He loves tech, loves reading about tech, and is excited about new things in tech - especially around the topic of tooling.
He really enjoys music, having played the guitar for a while. He now focuses on this recently acquired African drum. He connects with music on a deep level, and can see the correlation between tech and music (or at least, now that we have discussed it). He loves to play sports as well, specifically he loves running. In fact, he ran a marathon a couple of years ago, which in his words was very very... painful. In Israel where he lives, the timing of the marathon is towards the end of the winter... so training requires running in the rain and bad weather.
When he was 24 years old, he had become very familiar with cyber security during his time in an elite cyber unit in the Israeli intelligence corps. He and his co-founder had a unique understanding, and as such advantage, to bring value to the industrial cyber security world.
Noah Labhart ‘04 joins us today to talk about his on-demand marketplace for manufacturing labor, Veryable Incorporated. Noah breaks down challenges, opportunities, and solutions he sees within the industry, and tells us maybe the biggest BHAG we’ve heard on the show. We appreciate Noah for dropping his wisdom on this week’s episode, and we encourage you to check out his podcast, Code Story! Thanks and Gig ‘em!
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Paul Biggar was born in Dublin, Ireland, and lived there most of his life. When he was young, his Dad had a couple of computers, where Paul could program in Basic and Logo. In addition to these early introductions, he was into building his own machines, and tweaking their hardware settings to get the most optimal performance out of them. He completed his CS undergrad after spending many years into computers, along with his Phd, before heading off to Silicon Valley to do the tech startup thing. He currently lives in NY, and during the pandemic, his primary activity outside of tech and entrepreneurship is taking walks with friends.
In a past venture, he was the founder of CircleCI, the very popular continuous integration tool for engineering teams. Building on his successes here, he started to look at how difficult it was to deploy code, to do infrastructure, to write code, how teams interact, and many other friction points for the SDLC. He set out to remove the complexities of how we build apps today.
Erik Chelstad is a child of both coasts. In his life, he spent a lot of time skiing, and carried that activity into his adult life. Funny enough though, he is actually a better boarder than skier. He volunteers with the local avalanche centers, and climbs mountains where he lives - which is the Pacific Northwest, near Mt. Ranier. In his words, climbing gives him ample time to think.
He's married, and just moved into a house outside of the city. He has found a new hobby in being a home owner, which he says as a new platform to play with - cameras, sensors, sprinkler systems - etch. They have a dog, and if they are lucky enough to have kids one day, Erik hopes it will be easier than having a dog... and, that the kids won't bite him.
In a prior venture, Erik was the owner of bakeries. In developing certain channels for distribution, he ran into a problem where he didn't have visibility to his product at places he didn't control. He figured out the answer was cell phones, and a centralized location for entities to consume this information.
Daniel Gallancy is a husband and father to an 18 month old son. He studied electrical engineering and physics in school, but ended up working in finance, doing diligence on tech companies for an investment fund. In 2011, he discovered bitcoin and became enamored with the concept. At that time, he bought 1 whole bitcoin for $4 dollars. Looking back, he obviously wishes he would have bought more. We got into an interesting conversation about ICO's - initial coin offerings - and tokens in general, around how companies drive up the value of said tokens through usage, rather than business profit. In his words, he saw the ICO world as a regulatory arbitrage, which didn't make for a good investment, but did make an interesting story.
In 2013, he decided to leave the hedge fund world - IE his nice cushy job - and pursue something in the crypto world. Ultimately, he realized that some of the more interesting concepts being used in crypto - specifically, distributed key management - could be used in solutions outside of the block chain world. In a discussion with his co-founder, they figured out that solutions like this didn't exist, and that they wanted to build it.
